How do large service businesses spend their marketing budget?

If you're trying to figure out your marketing budget, in this video, I'm going to go through how I would allocate funds for a local service business. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting and we partner with local service businesses and help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And in this video, I'm going to show you some of the mindset and some of the strategies that we utilize to get a 3, 5, 10x return on marketing spend. And I'm going to show you some real strategies that you can implement in your business. Cool. So let me go in and share my screen real quick. Let me make me smaller. All right, so let's say first let's figure out what the marketing budget is. So on average, most companies are spending about 3 to 10% of their total revenue on their marketing budget. So let's say that you're doing, let's say $100,000 a month. And this might seem outrageous, but you can figure out what the number is for you. So let's say that we're going to times this by just 3%. That will give us $3,000 budget every single month. And obviously you can figure that out for you. Maybe it's only $300 if you're doing $10,000 a month. If you're doing nothing, then what you want to do is set aside maybe 300, 500 bucks a month to start getting some leads in. And I'm going to show you how to do that. But first thing is to set whatever your marketing budget is. And I'm going to go through. Typically we work with companies that are doing seven figures plus. So I'm just going to kind of walk through some of the strategies that we utilize with them. But, but I'll show you some of the low hanging fruit things to get a marketing plan set up. All right, so we've discussed this in past videos, but essentially three marketing strategies. The three that you need for your business are visibility, you need leads coming in, you need to convert those leads into sales, and then you need to retarget these people and bring them back into your funnel. Over here, you're just building a database of people that have already gone through your funnel, whether it's a prospect or customer, and you're just bringing them back into the funnel through retargeting strategies. And we're going to discuss what that looks like. All right, so from a visibility perspective, how would we look at spending this money? So if you already have an existing website and if you're an established business like the ones that we work with. But again, I'm going to go through this, then the first thing we would do is look at optimizing the website. And what does that optimizing mean? We made videos about this before, but effectively you want to have several call to actions on your website. You want to have something that says request an estimate schedule service. You want to have a little chat widget down here where people can text you back and forth. And maybe you want to have some other like free giveaway thing like this free local search audit that we give away. But maybe you have like a pricing guide for carpet cleaning or whatever, whatever your giveaway is. So we would first off invest in coming up with some new call to actions on the website that are correct. Because what happens is people will go to our website and they will not interact with us. We want to convert 10%. So if we get 100 people to the website, we want to convert them at 10%, 100 people to the website, 10 people. So we would look at that. We use Google Analytics. So we probably set up some type of Google Analytics or have someone set that up. And effectively what we'd be able to do is see how many people come to our site and how many people fill out this stuff. So first thing we would go through and optimize our call to actions on the website. The reason this is important is because when you set up like your Google business profile or your Angie or whatever you're doing when you're starting out, even just like a Facebook or something, you want to have a central hub that you can drive traffic to where people can go, because obviously you know, they could just DM you. But eventually you want to get professional where you have something that is going to drive traffic to a hub on your like a website. So we would want to optimize these things. The second thing we would do is we would look at running some type of ads. So either Google Local service ads or Google search ads. And I'm going to run through what these numbers would look like. But Google local service ads are effectively. You would go here, you're going to. You would put in your zip code, let's say, I'll put mine in. And let's say we wanted 10 leads and we want a carpet cleaning. Then we know that we would be spending 23 to $35 per lead. So 230 to $350 to get 10 leads just because we're, just because we have this as our allocated monthly Budget doesn't mean we're going to be getting these leads in. And what we found is that these leads can convert at 50, 40, 50% depending on, you know, who gets the call. But that's how we would do this. So let's say that you spent $230. Let's say you spent $350. And let's say your average ticket is $400. And let's say you close half of these. So $400 times five would be $2,000. And let's say you spent $350 to get the $2,000. That's almost a 10x return. So that's a very simple way to spend $350 and potentially make $2,000. And again, the beauty of this is that ads are scalable. And let's say you want to increase your ad budget. Same thing. So first we'd start with that. The second thing we would do is we would run some search ads, some of your traditional search ads. So let's say that it's carpet cleaning near me. These right here, these are your traditional search ads. And the way that these search ads works are you actually just pay to play. So it's not like a pay per lead model, which is the one that I just showed. But, but effectively the way that this works is you would spend, let's say $1,000 on these search ads and you have a cost per click. And let's say the average cost per click, let's say is 3 to $5. Let's say it's $5 per click, which is pretty high. But let's say $5. The reason that's high is because these are high intent searches, which means people are searching for carbon cleaning near me. They just want the first option they're going to click through onto your website. And again, these are things that people could track for you, but just giving you the numbers. So let's say that $5 per click out of this, a thousand dollars. So we're going to divide this by $5. So that means we got 200 clicks. So 200 people to our website. And remember, our goal is to convert at 10% on the website because we already have all those things optimized for those call to actions. So we have 200 visitors to our website and we're going to convert that at 10%. So we're going to get 20 leads. And let's say that again, that those 20 leads, let's say that we convert 50% of them. So now we're down to 10 leads, 10 actual jobs, and our average transaction is $400. That's $4,000. We just spent $1,000 to get $4,000. So that's a 4x return. The beauty of Google search ads is that they will run them. Google will spend your money. Google local service ads, they're a lot more choosy on who they put because they don't make any money unless someone actually clicks on the profile and turns into a lead. So they're not just going to throw people out there like this. They're going to try to be strategic. So there is a big emphasis on Google local service ads to get Google reviews because they're going to want that, a good reputation and a good online business. So that way people will actually click on that business to use them. So they do preferentially treat a lot of the bigger companies, which is why again we would run those, but just showed you you can forex your marketing budget for Google search ads on that. All right, so once you get that in place, now you start to get little bit of business coming in the door your way. And so now you can really start to play the branding game, which is not just focus on your transaction. We just showed how you can scale up some of your transaction, but really what you can start to do now is really build out this entire system once you start getting some business in the door. Traditionally, like I said, we work with companies that are, you know, seven figures plus, so they kind of already have the system in place. We just come through and tighten up all these processes and build these automations and oversight into them, you know, numbers and that kind of stuff. But effectively what you want to do is you start getting business in the door and then you want to get those reviews because again, that helps you from your Google local service ads perspective. But more importantly, it's going to help you with your organic search online. And I didn't go through, you know, setting up a Google business profile, setting up your social media accounts, going into Facebook groups and marketing your stuff, partnering with other local businesses to get referrals, going to networking groups. I mean there's a bunch of things you can do to really get your business off the ground. But effectively what I'm trying to show is that once you get a decent business flow, you can easily start to add a little gas onto the fire to get your leads flowing. So once they come through this conversion funnel, which you tighten that up with those call to actions, you're going to ask for reviews, then you're going to start to do your retargeting. And a lot of CRMs, client relationship managers have tools like this, you know, like Jobber Service Monster Service, Fusion housecall Pro, Service Titan. All these ones, they have some type of retargeting. If you don't have any CRM currently, you can use a tool like Mailchimp. Basically it allows you to upload like 500, 1000 people into your database and then just start emailing them monthly or just even quarterly. You can set different people and give them some type of special promotions to bring them back into your funnel. So basically what we would do is try to set up a system where we're bringing in new leads and try to get down to our customer acquisition cost cac. And we could easily say that a new customer is going to cost us $50. So in that channel we can increase our ad spend and get new leads in while building the brand marketing side of things, which is all of this visibility over here. So a lot of our customers, they don't spend a ton of money on those ad channels. They could, but a lot of what they focus on is just building a solid brand in the marketplace through organic SEO, which is building your Google business. But I know that when you're starting out or you're looking for other ways to get business, you don't want to see the same old, hey, you know, get Google reviews, get a Google business profile. So I try to show you some other strategies. If you're interested in discussing your business, you can go to the link below. Be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you like marketing content. We post videos every week and we'll see you in the next video.